Today Fort Lauderdale is the Venice of America — a city of canals and yachts, a great beach and a busy river, with a frontier fort and a trading post somewhere underneath it all. Its story runs from a Tequesta river and an 1838 Seminole-War fort, through Frank Stranahan's 1893 trading post and the 1920s canal boom, to the yachting and cruise capital it is now. Our Fort Lauderdale designs gather that identity into wearable form — the alligator emblem, the New River, and the canals. Fort Lauderdale, Florida: the Venice of America, on the New River where the city began.
The water has defined the city ever since. Fort Lauderdale grew through a Second World War naval-air era and a postwar tourism boom into the place it is now: a major Atlantic beach destination, a great cruise port at Port Everglades, and a center of the yachting world, host to one of the largest boat shows anywhere. The New River still runs through downtown past the Riverwalk and Las Olas Boulevard, and the roughly 165 miles of canals that thread the city remain its signature — liquid streets that earned the Venice of America its name.
Why People Visit Fort Lauderdale
Fort Lauderdale offers South Florida at its most nautical — a real beach city laced with canals, with a historic river downtown, a great cruise port, and the yachting world's calendar built around it. Visitors come for the water, the beaches, and the Venice-of-America canals, and stay for Las Olas, the Riverwalk, and the easy coastal pace. From the New River to the sand, it rewards a day or a week. It is bright, nautical, and genuinely South Florida.
